ACA Open Enrollment

How to Use a CRM During ACA Open Enrollment

Open enrollment is the highest-pressure time of year for health insurance agents. Leads come in fast, follow-up windows are short, and enrollment deadlines are unforgiving. The agents who close the most enrollments are not necessarily the most experienced — they are the most organized.

Why open enrollment demands a real CRM

During AEP and OEP, a typical agent might be working 50 to 200 active leads at once. Without a system, some leads get three calls in two days while others fall completely off the radar. A CRM solves this by giving you one place to see every lead, every status, and every next step.

Spreadsheets break under this kind of volume. They do not send reminders, they do not trigger follow-up emails, and they do not tell you which leads you have not touched in five days. A CRM built for insurance agents does all of that automatically.

Before open enrollment: what to set up in your CRM

• Import your book of business. Get all existing clients into the system with tags like "renewal due," "Medicare-eligible," or "referring household" so you can target them during OEP.
• Build your drip campaigns early. Create email sequences for new leads, cold leads, quoted leads, and enrolled clients before enrollment season starts — not during it.
• Set up your pipeline stages. Define clear stages: New Lead, Contacted, Quote Sent, Application Submitted, Enrolled, Not Interested, Lost. This lets you see exactly where your business is at a glance.
• Prepare your email templates. Write templates for the most common scenarios — initial outreach, quote follow-up, deadline reminders, and post-enrollment thank-yous.

During enrollment: the four things your CRM should handle

• Lead intake and deduplication. New leads from web forms, referrals, and lead vendors should flow into the CRM without manual data entry. The CRM should flag potential duplicates automatically.
• Automatic follow-up sequences. When a new lead comes in, a drip campaign should start immediately: an email within the hour, an SMS the next morning, and a task reminder to call. Agents who respond in under five minutes are far more likely to reach the prospect.
• Status-based organization. Every lead should always have a current status. When a status changes — for example, from "Quote Sent" to "Application Submitted" — the CRM should automatically stop the follow-up drip and start an enrollment confirmation sequence.
• Deadline reminders. ACA enrollment deadlines move. Your CRM should let you set task reminders tied to specific dates so no lead misses their window because of a follow-up gap.

After enrollment: retention is revenue

Closing an enrollment is not the end of the relationship — it is the beginning. Agents who stay in touch post-enrollment see dramatically higher retention rates at renewal time. Set up a post-enrollment drip that checks in 30, 90, and 180 days after the plan start date. Use it to answer questions, collect referrals, and plant seeds for the next enrollment cycle.

How Cadence handles open enrollment

Cadence CRM is built specifically for health insurance agents. It includes contact management with insurance-specific fields, a visual pipeline, email and SMS campaigns, automated drip sequences, and Claude AI to help you draft outreach and analyze your pipeline. Everything is in one place — no integrations to break and no separate tools to manage.